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My database for a forum

Hey guys. I am most likely going to be building my own forum. I am wondering about how I should go about making my db. I will have one big db called forums. Then what should I do. Have a table made for each topic and then a big table with all the topics and the id of the table with the rest of posts for that topic? Or should I have one table with all of the posts and a "parent id" for which topic they are under. I am leaning towards a table for each topic but I would like some guidance here.

Ok, so not lots of tables. So here would be the table data:
id | description | thread_content | poster | views | parent_id | type etc...
The parent id would be the id of the original post and views would only be kept for the kind of type (either topic or reply) topic.